With the advent of laser printing, many users desire the ability to overlay text data atop background image data. For example, users desire background images, such as company logos, watermarks, headers and footers with an overlay of text based data with character sets, such as data contained in financial and inventory reports, invoices, and checks.
A conventional technique for overlaying text onto background templates for reports is to hire consultants to implement a software solution for customizing all of a company's reports. To create these customized reports, the consultants manually convert all of the text reports to include background images, such as a company logo or watermark. Typically, for a suite of reports for a typical financial system, a team of consultants might need to customize as many as 3000 reports. For example, a customer might need to modify thousands files to simply add a company logo to company invoices, checks, and other reports. The modification would need to be to repeated every time a patch or upgrade is applied to the software. There are some third party solutions to assist customers that have customization requirements. However, third party solutions are often proprietary, may not be supported, may require additional licensing fees, and may add other expenses, such as the expense of hiring consultants that specialize in the third party solution. Some drawbacks to conventional techniques are that hiring consultants and customizing are expensive and time-consuming. Another drawback of conventional techniques is that when a new version of software is released, resources are needed to upgrade customized reports for the newer versions of the software. Yet another drawback to conventional techniques is that many customers choose to not upgrade their software because of the time and effort and expense required for reformatting customized reports.
Typically, reports are designed with matching column lengths for data and fixed width columns. A drawback to conventional techniques for reformatting customized reports is that formatting changes for reports must be done manually for each report. Furthermore, including a background image such as a company logo, watermark, header, or footer changes the formatting of the report. The manual formatting and the changes to the formatting add additional expenses and time to the process of generating documents.
Another conventional technique for overlaying text onto background templates includes purchasing customized stationery with logos, watermarks, background images, headers, and footers. For printing invoices or checks on high fidelity papers, customers have to use preprinted stationery or use a costly hardware solution that is proprietary. In order to print customized reports, invoices and checks, customers manually feed the customized stationary into a printer. A drawback to customized stationary is that end users need to arrange the position of the report to be printed on the customized stationery by changing characteristics such as margins, pitches, and spaces between lines for every printer. Another drawback to customized stationary is that it requires knowledge of printer control commands. Often, the printer control commands vary among printers. In addition, the report has to be reprinted every time a positional attribute is changed so that the report fits in the correct position on the stationery. Furthermore, creating customized stationary requires using specialized printing materials to print invoices, reports, and checks. Another drawback to customized stationary is that it is very expensive.
Another conventional technique for overlaying text onto background templates is to implement a hardware solution. Hardware solutions typically send escape sequences for layered data and images. A drawback to hardware solution is that hardware solutions typically draw layers one at a time, and the hardware solutions are often report-specific, printer-specific, and hardware-specific. For example, printing different types of customized reports requires different custom hardware solutions. Thus, invoices would require one custom hardware solution, and checks would require another custom hardware solution. Furthermore, each hardware solution may also require a proprietary printer format.
The present inventors have recognized the above problems and concluded that it is desirable to provide an improved mechanism for overlaying text onto background templates.